1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to electronic typewriters and, more particularly, it relates to hyphenating words at a right margin to provide reasonably aligned right margins of printed lines on a work sheet.
2. Prior Art
A common procedure used to hyphen words for reasonably aligning right margins is to print a complete word after hearing a conventional right margin signal, manually erase printed characters until reaching a hyphen position of a word, print a hyphen, depress a carrier return key, and manually retype the erased characters.
Disadvantages of this procedure are the requirement of a typist performing several manual operations and the burden on the typist to remember which characters were erased for printing on the next line.
A U.S. Pat. No. 3,780,846 issued Dec. 25, 1973 and invented by Robert A. Klopek and Robert A. Rahenkamp teaches reprinting erased characters from memory after a typist adds new characters in print positions of erased characters. The characters were erased for the purpose of making insertions in previously typed text.
A U.S. Pat. No. 2,717,686 issued on Sept. 13, 1955 and invented by Robert R. Seeber, Jr. teaches automatic printing from memory at the beginning of the next line when a hyphen is printed at the end of a previous line. The purpose of this invention is to automatically print selected words or phrases from memory to reduce the efforts of the typist and to increase the speed of the typist.
Neither of these two patents teach automatic erasing printed characters and printing a hyphen in response to depressing a hyphen key for the purpose of reasonably aligning right margins.